Old Wars New Wars

As the recipient of the Testbed commission supported by Leeds Met Gallery, I have spent the last 18 months creating a new body of work, and developing my practice through travel, networking and further training.

This blog is a chance to engage with the project. Included is the essay Real Enough for You? by the Pil and Galia Kollectiv.

Old Wars New Wars considers how an artist can engage intimately with the issue of war from any distance. The exhibition presents work that closes the distance between war production and cultural production by fusing familiar images or objects of war with moments in cultural and art history, a de familiarisation that re-engages us withthe complexities of our relationship to war. The work also raises questions on therelationship between violence, aesthetics and ethics in art production.

In Old Wars New Wars replica land mines are laid out on the floor in a grid painted inthe colours of a 1957 Josef Albers Homage to the Square, a painting made around the time the land mines were first put to use. Alongside these a ’remix’ of found footage of explosions from the current war in Iraq and a sequence of watercolour paintings which represent the first seconds of an explosion.